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Find meta robots and noindex in the HTML of a page

harmlessSEO checksdebian, ubuntu
Adjust the values, the command updates live
user@server
curl -s https://example.com/ | tr '\n' ' ' | grep -oiE '<meta[^>]*name=.?(robots|googlebot)[^>]*>'

Prints all <meta name="robots"> and <meta name="googlebot"> tags from the HTML. A forgotten noindex after a relaunch, or caused by the WordPress option “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”, is a common reason for lost visibility. No output means there is no meta robots tag, so the default index, follow applies.

Note: Also check the HTTP header, see the entry on the X-Robots-Tag. curl does not see tags added later via JavaScript.

Also searched as

  • check if page is noindex
  • check meta robots tag
  • page disappeared from google
  • find nofollow in page source

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$curl -s -o /dev/null -D - https://example.com/ | grep -i '^x-robots-tag'
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$curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %{redirect_url}\n' https://example.com/diese-seite-gibt-es-nicht-$RANDOM
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$curl -s -o /dev/null -D - https://example.com/ | grep -iE '^(HTTP/|retry-after:)'
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Check the status code of all sitemap.xml URLs in parallel

$curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+' | xargs -P 8 -I{} curl -o /dev/null -s -w '%{http_code} %{url_effective}\n' {} | grep -v '^200 ' | sort
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Collect all URLs from a sitemap index

$curl -s https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+' | xargs -n1 curl -s | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+' | sort -u
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Extract all URLs from a sitemap.xml

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